America at War since 1945: Politics and Diplomacy in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan

INTRODUCTION

In 1945 the United States came away from World War II as a victor over an obvious evil, a world leader, and prepared to put behind it the horrors of war. In fact, between V-J Day and June 1950, when the Korean War started, America began a predictable slip back into its historic isolationism, insisting it had no interests (as it had insisted for nearly two centuries) in the petty conflicts of the world. But the rising specter of communism changed all that. Americans began to see the spread of communism as a cancer that must be limited and contained. The fear played well in the American political arena—used by politicians as an issue to further their careers and enhance their opportunities for election. By the time North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950, the nation’s political situation virtually demanded that United States president Harry Truman move immediately to stop the invasion—and America was involved in its second war in five years. When the Chinese attacked later that fall (implementing their own brand of containment), the U.S. forces found themselves in rapid retreat against the massive Red Army. Only after three years of intense negotiations did the United States finally extricate itself from that conflict—claiming little more than a stalemate.

Did the United States learn any lessons in Korea? Would it again allow itself to become involved in a land war that the American people did not fully support, in a far-off place that had little significance to the defense of the nation? In Vietnam, the French defeat in 1954 meant the collapse of anticommunist forces there—something that Washington could not allow in the still politically charged era of the anti-Communist 1950s. America’s involvement in Southeast Asia grew slowly through the late 1950s and the early 1960s. President John Kennedy, however, strongly believed that it was important to show the American people that he was not soft on communism and that in at least someplace in the world he was sending troops to fight for freedom. But the war in Vietnam was not so much a war against communism as a war against Vietnamese nationalism, a political force (and ultimately a military force) that was nearly unstoppable. By the mid-1960s the United States was again caught in an enormous quagmire of a war, against a force it could not defeat, in a faroff region of the world that really meant little to American defense—or the American people. But once U.S. leaders came to see that fact clearly, they found that extricating the nation’s fighting force from the region was nearly impossible—at least from a political standpoint. As in Korea, the war dragged into stalemate, soldiers died, and America’s place in the world order slipped proportionately. In addition, the nation divided over the war and the ghosts of Vietnam haunted the nation for decades.

In both wars, the United States fought to show the world that it would stand up to the evils of communism, that it could be counted on (with money, advisors, or even a major military effort if necessary) to halt the Communist advance. The United States set itself up as the major defender of anticommunism, the leader of the free world. Both wars, however, showed that the United States was militarily vulnerable, that the American people often did not stand behind their nation’s foreign policy, and that the U.S. involvement often came with a price tag that was too high to pay. At home, Americans lost faith in their government and in their military. But in 1990, as the Gulf War was about to begin, President George H.W. Bush insisted there would be no more Vietnams—just as his critics argued that the war in Iraq might turn into another Korea-like stalemate. Bush, however, saw an opportunity to place the United States back into its old post-World War II position of prominence. The cold war was over, and the Soviets (and their proxies) were no longer a threat of any significance. Madmen like Saddam Hussein, however, still persisted, and there was still a need, so it seemed, for the United States to protect the world’s weak nations against tyranny and aggression. Thus, in 1990, the United States would become what it had been in 1945: a world leader and the defender of freedom. For Americans, the Gulf War was a relief, a breath of fresh air. When the one hundred hours of fighting ended in the Iraqi desert, President Bush said privately that the nation had finally kicked the Vietnam Syndrome, that the many ghosts of Vietnam and Korea had finally stopped haunting the nation.

Not unlike his father, George W. Bush would be defined by his reaction to crises. And those crises would come; first in the September 11 attacks, and then in the wars on terror in Afghanistan and Iraq. Americans would follow him into battle, throwing their support to his initiatives against terrorists. But many Americans quickly grew tired of the wars. They questioned the initial reasoning for going to war and the manner in which the wars were being fought. Then they began asking the all-important questions, the questions that had been first asked in Korea and then in Vietnam: what is the strategy for withdrawing, and when? Bush’s answers were unsatisfying, and Americans found themselves in two wars, fought in far-off parts of the world, while soldiers and civilians died in alarming numbers.

Even the most critical of observers tried to avoid comparisons with Vietnam, because there were certainly important differences—but there were obvious parallels. If it is true that George Bush, the father, had seen the ghosts of Vietnam when he fought Saddam Hussein in the early 1990s, George Bush, the son, was not similarly haunted. He found himself propping up an unstable government and fighting an irregular army on a battlefield that was not defined, and for reasons that were not entirely clear to the American people. In a 2007 speech, the president stepped back into the Vietnam quagmire by insisting that the United States should not have left Vietnam, that had the nation stayed the course, it would have won. Newsweek called the remark an abuse of historical fact.

There were a number of other events in the Bush administration that showed that the United States was not invulnerable, that despite its great power, it could still be attacked, could still get bogged down in an expensive war, and could fall out of favor with the world and even diminish its leadership role. It was a frustrating time. Polls reflected a lack of confidence in the government. In 2007, over 70 percent of those polled said they did not like the direction the nation was headed—an amazing number, considering the strength of the economy and relative security at home. The president’s approval ratings occasionally dipped below 30 percent; approval ratings for Congress often dropped below 20 percent. Both political parties began asking themselves: What do the people want? As the 2008 presidential campaign approached, both candidates, senators Barack Obama and John McCain, focused their campaigns on the issue of change. Eight years later, the presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, continued to call for change—and a new direction for the nation.

This book was first published in 1996. The focus then was on the ghosts of Vietnam, and how that war (and the war in Korea before it) had shaped U.S. foreign policy clear through the 1990s. America’s second involvement in the Middle East under George W. Bush was a different conflict, but the lessons of Korea and Vietnam were still there, still a factor in U.S. foreign policy.

PART I

KOREA

1

ORIGINS AND INVOLVEMENT

The United States became involved in the Korean War in June 1950, just five years after World War II ended. For most Americans, the war in Korea, at first, represented the proper response to what seemed to be the onward march of world communism and the impending decline of American influence abroad if lines were not drawn and defended. Certainly, in 1950 Americans were of the opinion that their nation’s military force could deal with the situation in Korea, just as it had dealt with the great powers of Germany and Japan only a few years earlier. And, as the war was presented to the American people (as a police action under the guise of the United Nations), it seemed less the war that it would become, and more the job of America to ferret out and push back the tyrants of world communism. So it was that America became involved in another war just five years after the end of World War II.

The end of World War II brought to America what appeared to be a clean-cut victory over a palpable evil. If anyone in the world doubted that, there was the striking evidence of the Nazi prison camps and the Japanese atrocities against its Asian neighbors. For most of America, World War II had been a good war, a war in which sacrifices had paid off handsomely in a complete military and moral victory, leaving the United States free of any serious enemies and free to turn its now-huge military-industrial complex into peaceful production that would bring jobs, products, and ultimately prosperity to the people of the nation. Satisfied in their victory and rich beyond compare in the new world order, Americans could now turn their attention to peace and prosperity. The war’s duration had finally come.

However, the end of the war simply brought on a new series of international problems, the most serious of which was the postwar disposition of the German and Japanese empires. There were now huge power vacuums in Asia and Europe, and somehow those power vacuums would have to be filled. Deciding the future of these areas was to be the focus of several big-power conferences during the war. Korea had been a part of the Japanese Empire since the early decades of the century; its fate would be decided at these conferences.

Korea first came under Japanese rule as a result of Russia’s defeat in the Russo-Japanese War that ended in 1905. Korea had looked to Russia for assistance against Japanese encroachments, and with Russia’s defeat, Japan took the opportunity to force Korea into its sphere of influence. In the Treaty of Portsmouth, Japan’s leaders received much less than they believed their decisive victory over Russia warranted, but they did obtain a controlling influence in Korea, and from there the Japanese hoped to extend their authority into the mineral-rich region of Manchuria, the real prize on the Asian mainland and Japan’s ultimate objective through the next decades. In 1910 Japan annexed Korea and gave the peninsula its ancient name of Chosen. Japan’s appetite for greater influence and imperial conquests on the Asian mainland eventually brought it into conflict with China in the 1930s, and that ultimately precipitated the Pacific war that drew in the United States in December 1941.

The disposition of postwar Korea was first dealt with at the Cairo Conference in 1943 in which the United States, England, and China planned for Korea’s freedom in what was vaguely termed due course. Two years later at the Yalta Conference, Franklin Roosevelt proposed that after the war Korea should be placed under an international trusteeship that would ultimately guide the country toward independence.

Roosevelt was an ardent anti-colonialist, and he hoped that a postwar Asia would be free from the suppression of Western colonial domination. The French colony of Indochina and the Dutch colonies in the East Indies had all come under Japanese control during the war, and Roosevelt hoped that as the Japanese armies withdrew from these areas following Tokyo’s impending surrender, the old Western colonies would become free and independent nations. In that same vein, Roosevelt also pressured England to grant independence to its Asian colonies after the war. England’s prime minister, Winston Churchill, however, believed strongly in maintaining the English colonial system, and for much of the war the two world leaders found themselves at odds over the question of postwar colonialism in Asia. FDR’s anti-colonial stance seemed noble, but it was only partly aimed at granting self-determination to the peoples of Asia. Roosevelt also intended that an Asia free of Western colonial networks would open the vast Asian markets to American manufacturers after the war. An Asia free of colonial rule would greatly benefit America’s postwar economy.

Certainly, the largest power vacuum left by Japan’s defeat would be in China, and plans for a postwar Asia could not go forward without some consideration for the most populous nation in the world. Before World War II expanded into the Pacific, China had been embroiled in a bitter civil war between the Guomindang Nationalist forces led by Generalissimo Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) and the Communist armies of Mao Zedong. When China’s war with Japan broke out in 1937, Mao and his forces went into exile in the north, and Jiang became the sole recognized power in China. During the war, Japan came to control much of eastern China, while Jiang and the Guomindang fled west to Chongqing in Szechwan province and Mao and his forces remained concentrated in the north around Yan’an in Shaanxi province. These two Chinese contingencies remained in direct ideological conflict throughout the war, but faced with the common threat from the Japanese army, the two forces reluctantly formed the United Front against their common enemy. This United Front was uneasy and for the most part unsuccessful against the Japanese, and most of the world believed that the two forces were simply waiting out the war in their provincial strongholds, preparing to resume their own internal conflict once the war against Japan ended.

There was a great fear, particularly in Washington, that a resumption of the Chinese civil war following the withdrawal of Japanese troops might place the world’s Communist forces against the world’s non-Communist forces on the Chinese mainland—and that the United States and the USSR might be drawn into that conflict on opposing sides. The prospect of such a war clearly plagued Roosevelt, and he moved to disarm that postwar scenario at the Yalta Conference in February 1945.

Yalta had far-reaching implications for postwar America and the world. It was here that Josef Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt decided the fate of the postwar world. The future of Europe was the chief concern of the negotiators to be sure, but it was at Yalta that Korea’s postwar destiny was planned as well—or at least plans were put into place for the disposition of postwar Asia, and Korea was made a part of those larger plans.

FDR went to Yalta hoping to achieve several goals. First, he wanted to ensure freedom for the Polish people after the war. Second, he wanted an assurance that the Soviets would participate enthusiastically in the planned international organization that would become the United Nations. And third, he wanted to convince Stalin to enter the war against Japan once Germany was defeated in the west. It was this last point that would ultimately affect the future of Korea.

In early 1945 it was clear to America’s military leaders that an invasion of the Japanese mainland would be a mammoth undertaking, and that the cost in American lives of that invasion would be difficult to justify to the American public. Roosevelt hoped to convince Stalin to enter the war in the east after the defeat of the Germans in Europe and aid in administering the final blows to Japan by attacking the Japanese forces on the Asian mainland, particularly in Manchuria. It was a plan that would save the lives of thousands of American boys, but it was clear that Stalin would agree to such a plan only if he received major concessions. In fact, FDR was very much in a beggar’s position with this proposal; from the time of America’s entrance into the war in late 1941 until the D-Day invasion of 1944, Stalin had pleaded with FDR to open a second front in Europe to relieve the Soviet army of the burden of fighting the entire German army alone. America, weighed down with its own problems in the Pacific, failed to come to Stalin’s aid in a significant way before the summer of 1944. Now it was Roosevelt who was asking Stalin to relieve the pressure and aid American forces in the Pacific. Stalin would want concessions, and FDR would have to give them.

In hindsight, of course, FDR did not need the assistance of Soviet troops to defeat Japan. But the success of the atomic bomb was months away, and the probability of such a device becoming workable before the war’s end could not be factored into Roosevelt’s plans at Yalta. It seems fairly clear now that the Japanese might well have surrendered before an American invasion of the home islands would have become necessary. However, working from what he knew in February 1945, FDR believed that he needed the mass of the Red Army to defeat Japan, and he acted and entreated on that premise.

Stalin’s demands were considerable, but they did not stand in the way of FDR’s postwar plans for a greater Asia. In exchange for entering the war against Japan within a certain time following the defeat of Germany, the United States would not oppose Soviet control of Outer Mongolia through a puppet government there, the Kuril Islands (then in Japanese hands), the southern half of Sakhalin Island, control of Port Arthur in Manchuria, and joint operation with the Chinese of the major rail lines in Manchuria. In exchange, Soviet troops would move into Manchuria and engage the Japanese army there. They would also move into northern Korea.

Another part of this agreement would also ultimately affect Korea. Roosevelt insisted, and Stalin agreed, that the Soviets sign a treaty of friendship and alliance with Jiang and the Nationalist Chinese. This was important to FDR’s greater plan for the Far East because it denied Soviet support to Mao and the Chinese Communists—still holed up in northern China but preparing to move south into areas abandoned by the retreating Japanese army. Roosevelt wanted a coalition government in China, made up of Nationalists and Communists, or more properly, the moderates from both groups. He believed that if Soviet aid was denied to Mao and the Communists (by a Soviet-Guomindang treaty) the Communists would be forced to join such a coalition, and, of course, a postwar Chinese civil war would be averted. Ultimately, however, Roosevelt’s plan failed—mainly because of the insurmountable ideological differences between the two groups, but also because Mao had little need for Soviet support against Jiang and his already-crumbling Guomindang.

Roosevelt was also willing to make these concessions at Yalta because he feared that Stalin might move unilaterally in Asia if some sort of cooperative arrangement was not reached with the Soviets before the end of the Asian war. With U.S. forces engaged no closer to the Asian mainland than Okinawa in the summer of 1945, it would be impossible for the United States to deter any unilateral Soviet acquisitions or aggressions in Manchuria or Korea. FDR’s goals at Yalta, at least as far as Asia was concerned, were to reach an accord with Stalin and prevent an outbreak of a civil war in China.

But all this broke down when Roosevelt died two months later and Harry Truman moved into the White House—with no preconceived notions about cooperation with Stalin. Added to this was a mounting distrust of Stalin among the American people as the Soviets continued to strengthen their positions in Eastern Europe. At the same time, the need for Soviet aid against Japan ended abruptly when Truman was notified in late July 1945 that the atomic bomb was a success.

When the Asian war ended in August 1945, Truman issued General Order #1, designed to limit any unilateral advance by the Soviets: Japanese forces on the Asian mainland were to surrender to the forces of the Guomindang, not the Chinese Communists; and the United States was to occupy the Japanese home islands alone. A message from Ambassador Edwin Pauley in Moscow convinced Truman that the United States needed to move quickly to counter Soviet moves in Asia: Conclusions I have reached, Pauley wrote, lead me to the belief that our forces should occupy quickly as much of the industrial areas of Korea and Manchuria as we can, starting at the southerly tip [of Korea], and progressing northward.¹ As Soviet troops rushed into Manchuria and then into Korea, the United States feared Soviet control of the entire Korean peninsula and proposed to the Soviets an arbitrary division of Korea. The dividing line was set at the 38th parallel. To the surprise of U.S. military experts, the Soviets accepted the proposal and halted their advance. To enforce the arrangement, the United States flew in troops from Okinawa. They occupied the American half of the peninsula, below the 38th parallel, early in September 1945. This was America’s first act of containment in Asia; for the first time, the United States had drawn a line that was designed to contain Soviet expansion.

The final blow to the Yalta accords, and to Roosevelt’s grand plan for a postwar Asia, came with the resumption of fighting between the Chinese Communists and the Guomindang Nationalists. When the Japanese war ended, both sides moved in to claim territory abandoned by the retreating Japanese troops. The Communists had their greatest successes in the countryside and in the north, while the Guomindang moved to occupy the infrastructure of China—its cities, ports, and railroads. Through 1946 it was clear that both sides were preparing for a resumption of their conflict, and despite attempts by Truman’s special envoy, General George Marshall, to mediate a settlement, fighting broke out the next year. After two years of fighting, Jiang and the armies of the Guomindang were finally routed and crushed by Mao and his Red Army. Seeing that a Communist victory was inevitable, and being fed up with the graft and corruption in Jiang’ s government, Truman distanced himself from the collapse. Jiang and his supporters escaped to the island of Formosa, and on October 1, 1949, Mao declared the People’s Republic of China.

The fall of China to the Communists had a great impact on American politics for the next two and a half decades. Truman was forced to bear the blame for not coming to the aid of Jiang, a loyal ally in World War II, and for allowing the Communists to take over in China. Truman and the Democrats, the Republicans claimed, had lost China to the Communists. In response to this, and to other Republican attacks, Truman signed executive orders requiring oath-taking and investigations of suspected Communists employed by the federal government. All of this played hard on American politics and foreign policy in the postwar years. The Republicans continued to increase their pressure on the president to do something about the growing Communist menace, whether real or imagined, which led to an increase in get-tough rhetoric and get-tough action by the administration against the Soviets. America was moving toward the political center in the postwar years, becoming more politically moderate, and it soon became clear to Truman and his advisors that if the Democratic party was to remain in power through the decade they would have to jump on the anti-Communist bandwagon—at least to some degree. Politically it was the right move, and the strategy was partly responsible for Truman’s surprising 1948 election victory. But diplomatically it was a mistake. Truman’s anti-Communist belligerence exacerbated the already growing problems between the United States and the Soviets, and it was instrumental in pushing the world into a cold war.

In addition, several of Truman’s advisors wanted a get-tough-with-Stalin stance and counseled the president to move unilaterally in Europe and Asia to head off what appeared to be Soviet expansionist tendencies. In a memo, written for the president in September 1946, a young Clark Clifford, then special counsel to the president, wrote:

A direct threat to American security is implicit in Soviet foreign policy which is designed to prepare the Soviet Union for war with the leading capitalistic nations of the world. Soviet leaders recognize that the United States will be the Soviet Union’s most powerful enemy if such a war as that predicted by Communist theory ever comes about and therefore the United States is the chief target of Soviet foreign and military policy.²

Clifford drew the information for this memo from several leading members of the foreign affairs constabulary in Washington. It was the first peacetime interagency foreign policy review of U.S.-Soviet relations, and it clearly carried a great deal of weight with Truman. At the same time, much of the same advice was coming from other corridors. In July 1947, in an article in the foreign policy journal Foreign Affairs, George F. Kennan wrote of the evils of Soviet communism, and of the USSR’s desire to expand its borders and its influence. The United States, he wrote, should employ a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies through the application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points. He went on to call for restraint and balance in this policy, but few paid attention to that aspect of Kennan’s remarks.³ The focus instead was now on the new catchword: containment. Certainly, by 1950, when the Korean War broke out, rabid anticommunism was a pervasive factor in American society and politics, and in the administration’s foreign policy.

There was a great deal of political unrest in Korea immediately after the war. A nationalist revolution broke out there, and forces of the Right and Left often fought for control of the government in the South. General Douglas MacArthur (governing the American sector of Korea from Tokyo) set up a military government in Seoul under General John Hodge. Hodge feared being blamed for a Communist takeover in the South, and in response to that fear allied himself with the Far Right in the Korean internal conflict. He also kept the Japanese occupation system intact in the U.S. zone, which included making use of a brutal secret police force that had become the paramilitary arm of the right-wing. In the eyes of many Koreans this placed Hodge and his American troops in much the same position as the Japanese occupiers; and it also placed the Americans at odds with the political Left in the South. The result was that Hodge allowed the political Right to organize the government, restore order in the streets, and suppress the Left. By the end of 1945 Hodge had effectively crushed both the Left and Center, and had established a pro-American right-wing police state in the southern occupation zone of Korea.

Before the end of 1945 the U.S. military force in Korea was reduced to a sparse 45,000 men, reflecting Washington’s postwar policy of military cutbacks; but it also exhibited a lack of concern for the events taking shape on the Korean peninsula. Hodge responded to the troop reductions by building a Korean constabulary force under the control of a group of right-wing military officers. It was this army (along with the police force) that would control the American occupation zone from the Far Right in the immediate postwar years.

Through 1946 several attempts were made to unify Korea, oddly enough as both sides became more and more ingrained and established in their own occupation zones. The first plan was an agreement for a five-year trusteeship under a united provisional government. But the U.S.-supported right wing in the South opposed this plan as just another form of imperialism, and rejected it outright. The North, however, supported the plan. In early 1947, the United States proposed free elections throughout the peninsula. The Soviets rejected this idea, but they presented their own plan for a single united legislative body designed to give the Communists in the North a majority. That plan was rejected by the Americans.

As the two sides distanced themselves from one another, the United States brought in Syngman Rhee to give some legitimacy to its occupation of the southern zone. Rhee was a fierce Korean nationalist and an ardent anticommunist who had spent most of his life working unsuccessfully to free Korea from Japan’s imperialistic clutches. He was chosen because he had spent the war outside of Korea and had not collaborated with the Japanese, as had many political figures on the Right. In December 1946 a legislative assembly was set up in the South with Rhee and the Far Right in control.

Across the 38th parallel, the shape of things to come was also taking form. The Soviets, for the most part, kept their hands out of the affairs of northern Korea’s government, although they did work to place pro-Soviet Communists into high office. Their main figure was Kim II Sung, a staunch Communist and ex-guerrilla commander in the war against Japan. He had definite ties to the Soviets, but none to Mao and the Chinese Communists. This was important in Kim’s rise because the Soviets were suspect of those Korean Communists who had served with Mao, whom they considered an adventurer working outside the Marxist-Leninist guidelines as defined by Moscow. Kim was poorly educated (although he may have attended Soviet military schools) and easily manipulated by the Soviets. But as events would show, he was not a dupe of Moscow.

As the two governments, North and South, formed under their local leaders, the last attempts at unification failed. In September 1947 the fledgling United Nations took on the task of unifying Korea. A temporary commission was set up to observe a nationwide election on the peninsula, but when the commission was denied entrance into North Korea it recommended elections in the South only. That finally occurred on May 10, 1948, with Rhee and his rightists winning a large majority. On August 15, 1948, Rhee proclaimed the Republic of Korea and denounced the North for its obstruction of the unification process. In December the new nation received a seat in the United Nations as the only legitimate Korean government. The North responded in kind by creating the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea with its capital at Pyongyang and Kim as its president. In his inaugural address Kim declared his government to be the only legitimate Korean government, and then denounced the South for obstructing Korean unification. The country was divided: Two opposing governments were set up, one right-wing and capitalist, the other Communist. They were antagonists, each led by a belligerent dictator who hoped to unite the country under his personal leadership. And each was backed by one of the opposing super forces in the growing cold war.

By 1947 further budget concerns in Washington had forced an additional cut in U.S. troop numbers in Korea. Hodge responded by making it clear to the Pentagon that his depleted force was not strong enough to maintain a military post on the Asian mainland in the face of the huge Red Army assembled across the 38th parallel. The Joint Chiefs in Washington agreed and responded by planning for a complete unilateral withdrawal of American forces from Korea; in the event of an outbreak of hostilities on the Korean peninsula, the Joint Chiefs concluded that the United States could rely on its superior air force, then based at Okinawa, to deal with the problem. But just as that decision was being made in Washington in September 1947, the Soviets proposed a bilateral withdrawal of forces from both sides. This provided the United States with an easy way out of the growing mess in Korea: hand the whole problem over to the UN for settlement. It was decided in Washington that the occupation of Korea had become more